My grandmother and my father would always relate some little tidbit about life in the coal mining community of Harlan, Kentucky, which is where my family is from before they moved to Battle Creek in the 1940’s. While watching television, the movie Harlan County USA (1976) was airing. I got to thinking about how many persons in the documentary may be a relative. So I started a quest to branch out my family tree.
This hobby led to distant cousins who were having difficulties with their family trees. For many, they had hit their brick wall with the wrong information for Stephen Farmer, progenitor of Harlan County, Kentucky, and my 4th great grandfather.
Almost all of them had his father as “John Farmer” from Billerica, Massachusetts, presumably based on a book printed in the 1960s. As I dug a little deeper, I came to the conclusion that Stephen was a descendant of Edward Farmar, who had immigrated to Philadelphia at the age of thirteen in 1685.
The book Edward Farmar and the Sons of Whitemarsh balances vital statistics of births, deaths, and marriages along with local history in documenting a family that was constantly pushing the boundaries of America’s new frontier.
Two other books are currently in work, one starting with the origins of the family in the 1400s and ending in the 1680s, and the other continuing with Stephen Farmer’s descendants from 1800-2020.
